Bulletproof
by pens and dragons
Summary: 'What a fine piece in their games...what a loyal soldier'. Natasha Romanoff's story, from the Red Room to Winter Soldier to falling in love with Clint Barton.
1. Chapter 1

**I should be studying for my math test. Instead, I'm writing this. Enjoy! **

She still remembers the fire. Sometimes, she sees it in her dreams: the flames, the intense heat that burned her eyes, the glow of red upon her mother's terrified face. She remembers choking on thick, dark smoke. Someone carrying her from the blazing structure. A burned-out shell that smoked for days.

She still remembers the Red Room. A cold dormitory in the pale blue light of a Russian winter morning, a line of young girls in thin nightgowns. She remembers marching in circles around a stone courtyard beneath a grey sky. She remembers learning how to shoot a gun, the first time kicking so hard that it left a bruise on her shoulder. She remembers throwing knives, using snares and poison and bare hands. Trained to hunt, trained to kill. And so Natasha Romanoff became the hunter, the killer. The predator rather than the prey.

When she's eight, she wants to run away. She's had enough of the strict rules of the Red Room, she doesn't want to play with knives and guns anymore. She remembers a set of nesting dolls and longs for their brightly painted features. Darya finds her by the high wall that fences in the courtyard, one foot lodged in the loose brick, ready to launch herself over.

"Where are you going, Tash?"

Natasha stares up to the top of the wall. There's a thin line of bright light between the grey stone and the bright sky.

"I don't know," she confesses. "Somewhere else."

Darya, two years older than Natasha and therefore invariably wiser, tugs at the girl's thin wrists.

"Come down. There's nothing over there." She pauses, shielding her eyes from the blinding light. "Nothing important anyway."

She's a thin child, frail-looking, an almost ethereal beauty about her. The pale eyes and fire-colored hair lend her the appearance of some exotic creature. They use her as a decoy. Ivan brings her into his office, looks her up and down, his small eyes hungry. It's not her body he wants; it's her mind. He _consumes _her, and for all her toughness and resilience, she cannot fight back.

"You'll do well, Romanoff. You will make your motherland proud, will you not?"

She clicks her heels together, snaps one hand to her forehead like she's seen soldiers do on television.

"Yes sir!"

He chuckles, but there is something far darker behind his laugh. Even now, he can see what a fine tool she'll make. What a willing piece in his games. What a loyal soldier.


	2. Chapter 2

She's barely seventeen when she meets the Winter Soldier. He's a distant figure at first, because young men aren't common in the Red Room. She can barely recall a male figure under the age of forty being welcomed in the cloistered halls before. The other girls either swoon or ignore him. Natasha turns cold and wary, surveying this newcomer from afar. He's a Soviet agent, Darya informs her. Used to be the masked sidekick to some spandex-wearing Captain America. A _superhero_, Darya tells her. They don't have superheroes in Russia. Just ordinary people made great by circumstance.

When they're assigned a mission together, Natasha acts accordingly. Distant, chilly, vague. He tells her that he's never met a girl like her before.

"You're a mystery, Romanoff."

She allows him a brief smile, unsure of whether this is a compliment or not.

"Thank you, Agent Barns."

He pauses in loading his automatic weapon, fingers fiddling with a bullet casing.

"James. Uh, call me James."

She nods, pushing her long red hair away from her eyes.

"Thank you, _James._"

They become lovers by an unkind fate and by convenience. She has never been with a man before, and is wary and nervous, though she never shows it. He's gentle and kind and the whole time he whispers in her ear how beautiful she is. Afterwards, as they lie tangled together on a mattress in the attic of some safehouse in Leningrad, he tells her that he loves her. He strokes her long hair, and brushes his hand against her face. It's the first time that she's felt fragile in a long time.

One day, Ivan calls her into one of the labs. Behind a glass wall, a man is strapped to an electric chair. Ivan, accompanied by a group of men in war medals, instructs Natasha to pull a lever that will introduced electrical currents to the prisoner.

"You must do it," he tells her. She's a good soldier, well-trained, so she does it. He jerks and twists, fingers scrabbling at the arms of the chair. She watches impassively the first few times as he struggles. Then the currents become more powerful.

"Please!" The man screams. "I have a family! Children!"

Her fingers stall on the lever. Ivan prods her forward, tells her that this man is a prisoner and must be punished. There is something inside her that twists and burns like the man in the chair.  
"I have a daughter! A girl like you! Please don't do this!"

His neck snaps back in pain. Natasha can feel her appendages become numb with a kind of cold guilt.

"He's a traitor, Romanoff. What do we do with traitors?" Ivan asks, his voice deadly and quiet.

"We kill them," she replies softly.

He stops pleading with her, his words become screams. Inhuman, animalistic, purely pain. She yanks the lever down until he stops twitching and screaming and slumps forward, still. She doesn't stick around to see if he's dead or just unconscious. She knows that it was never about the traitor or punishments at all. It was about her loyalty to the Red Room, how far she was willing to go. How far she was willing to follow orders.

And she refuses to break, to snap, even when Ivan orders one of his men to cut off her long red hair. She sees the strands fall to the floor, her long braid curling like rope. She can't explain why, but the sight of the red hair coiled on the cool stones makes something inside of her snap. She pushes past Ivan and runs out of the laboratory and she runs until she finds James behind a dingy Stalingrad bar.

"You cut your hair!" He exclaims, reaching out to touch it. She slumps against the icy brick wall, resisting the urge to crumple into his arms.

"No. _They _cut it." She holds back her tears-and it's strange, because she hasn't cried in _years _and she can't understand why something so trivial should make her feel so heartbroken. "I hate it. I look horrible."

James reaches out and tilts her chin upward, forcing her blue eyes to meet his.

"I think you look beautiful."

She stares into his eyes, and sees an honesty there, a tenderness, that she has not seen in a long time.

She allows him to pull her close and kiss her in the gently falling snow. When the bartender glances out the dingy back window, he sees two young people embracing in a narrow alleyway. He sees two people in love, and nothing else. Natasha has two knives strapped to her right leg and a holster on her left ankle. James has a .45 on his hip and a long blade concealed in his jacket. You can't see their weapons, though. Not through the window, not through the falling snow and the way that they fit together, like two pieces of the same puzzle.

**Hope you all enjoy! And sorry for the long wait, my friends!**


	3. Chapter 3

**I apologize profusely for taking forever and a day to continue this. Hope you all enjoy this fic! And please, pardon any errors on my part. I'm just a fan, not an expert. (And I don't own any of these characters)**

Natasha is seventeen, but she and Darya still sleep side-by-side on the same cots in the same cold dormitory that they've lived in since...well, she can't remember. The years have passed in a blur, training and killing and fighting in the cloistered compound. The Red Room likes the girls young and innocent; naive, not yet hardened by life on the streets of Russia. It seems impossible that Natasha, the invincible young assassin, might have once been a young girl, vulnerable and weak. And yet sometimes she feels as if the small child plucked from the burning building is trapped inside of her, terrified and alone, screaming to get out.

"You're lucky to be assigned a male mentor for training," Darya says jealously one night, as the girls sit cross-legged on Natasha's bed. The dormitory is uncomfortably cold, the autumn harvest moon throwing strange shadows across the walls. "That Zhirov is a real bitch, I'll tell you that much."

Thinking about James brings a half-smile to Natasha's face, and she quickly disguises it with a smirk. No one can ever know about her relationship with the Winter Soldier-the consequences for both agents would be extreme, Natasha knows.

"He's a good agent," she agrees. "No wonder Ivan likes him."

Darya smiles at her, a knowing grin, and there's something reassuring about it, as if they're just two normal teenagers talking about their lives.

"He's cute," she says, eyebrows raised. "You should be careful to not get into trouble."

_Too late_, Natasha thinks, but she just laughs quietly.

"He wouldn't dare touch me," she lies. "No man would."

And for a moment, Darya looks almost sad.

"Yes," she says. "It's a good thing."

But Natasha watches Darya's downcast eyes in the moonlight and she wonders if it _is _a good thing.

A few weeks after she meets him, James takes Natasha north by railway, to the vast sprawl of snowy woods that surrounds Stalingrad. Natasha sits quietly in the crowded train car, watches the city fade into white countryside. James sits next to her and she can't look at him properly because they're alone together for the first time and they're headed away from the Red Room and she feels as if anything could happen. They get off the train in a little village near a winding river, and they walk into the woods, away from the sleepy houses and the little grey church.

"Why are we here?" Natasha asks when they stop in a lonely clearing and James puts down his rucksack. "Why did you take me here?"

He brings out a thermos of something, takes a long drag. Natasha glances into the sack-there are no weapons, but James is probably carrying. Lord knows she is.

"I want to know you," he tells her. "Away from all of..._them_."

He means the Red Room, the guards, the men in coats and uniforms and medals. The men who cut her open and made her into something more than human. He offers her the thermos, and she takes a drink-just to show him that she can-and it's hot and sour and burns a scalding trail down her throat and into her stomach. She almost sputters.

"What _is _this?"

When she looks up, he's looking at her with laughter in his eyes.

"Coffee," he says. "And whiskey. Don't you have that over here?"

Natasha narrows her eyes.

"We have vodka."

They sit down on a wide, flat rock, cross-legged and facing each other.

"Tell me about yourself," he invites. He looks eager. Natasha's eyebrows lift.

"I'm trained in various forms of martial arts, hand-to-hand combat and weaponry-"

"No," he cuts her off. "I meant about yourself as a person. Tell me your story."

Natasha takes a sip from the thermos and eyes him warily.

"Why do you want to know?"

He half-smiles and her heart does Olympic-worthy gymnastics.

"I like to know who I'm working with."

And so she tells him; tells him everything from the fire to learning how to shoot guns and break necks, and everything in between.

"Do you miss your parents?" He asks.

"Sometimes," Natasha says quietly, and she has never told anyone else about this, aside from Darya. He reaches over, bridging the gap between them, as if to take her hand. She jerks backwards.

"Don't touch me," she snaps, then sees the hurt in his eyes. "Please."

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sorry. I wasn't going to hurt you."

She tries to say something but she can't, because she doesn't quite believe it. People hurt you, that's how things work. Even if they don't intend to.

He breaks the awkward silence by asking if she's ever made a snow angel. She tells him that she doesn't know what a 'snow angel' is. James responds by pushing her off the rock, into the soft snow. She squeals and he flops onto his back next to her.

"Like this," he says, and moves his arms up and down like he's trying to fly away. Natasha tries it, hesitant at first, then flapping wildly, nose wrinkled and snowflakes catching in her eyelashes. When James pulls her to her feet, there are the imprints of two bodies in the snow: James, the wingspan wide and neat, and Natasha, whose snow angel more closely resembles a snow angel that has hit the windshield of a car going 90 on the highway. Hers looks like a bird trapped in deep snow, floundering, struggling to fly free.

And James turns towards Natasha, suddenly, and leans forwards, and his eyes are asking-no, begging-permission, and she tilts her face up towards his. She closes her eyes when their lips meet, because she's never kissed a boy before and she wants to remember everything about the moment: the way he smells like woodsmoke and coffee and gun oil, the cold air on her skin, and how his eager hands twine around her waist and draw her closer, closer, until she's flush against him and just for a moment, all is right with the world.

**The review button calls your name! -shameless begging-**


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